The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Switched Mode Power Supply (SMPS) DC/DC converters are used in an increasing number of electronic applications, such as cellular phones, laptop computers, etc., due to their higher efficiency than linear power supplies. Indeed, SMPS have lower power losses than linear power supplies. Another advantage of SMPS is their capability to provide a stabilized supply current or supply voltage to a load.
Controlling the stability of the power supply signal is a challenge for SMPS manufacturers. Indeed, electronic devices such as tablets or cellular phones, for instance, desire a well stabilized continuous voltage supply despite variations of temperature and variations of power consumption during their use for a phone call or during video recording, for instance. To meet this, it is useful to continuously control the voltage supplied to the electronic device and to adjust the operation of the SMPS.
An approach allowing controlling of the supply voltage delivered to the load by an output stage of the SMPS can include continuously monitoring the output voltage with a controller generating a duty-cycle signal delivered to the power-stage comprised of power switches such as power metal oxide semiconducting (MOS) transistors.
One potential drawback of this approach, however, is that it may be difficult to efficiently control the output supply voltage so as to accurately account for the intrinsic losses of the MOS transistors. These include static and dynamic contributions, namely ohmic losses and switching losses. Indeed, with an aim to increase the life-time of the battery, for instance, it is helpful to determine the losses of the SMPS with respect to the power requests of the load. As a result, the size of the output stage can be dynamically optimized in order to avoid extra power losses inside the SMPS during discharge of the battery, due to the switching losses occurring during normal operation of the device.